recap.capeco.de

We had a lot of fun last week on the Cape. Here’s a small recap of the
mini-projects, open source work, and more that we managed to get done between
hot tubbing, s'mores on the beach, and some Rock Band.

Dan Croak and Brian Mulligan sparred with Uncle Bob’s Bowling Game
Kata as a TDD exercise. The fruits of their labor
are on github. In related news, our pals at
EdgeCase started Ruby Koans, a
great site to be enlightened about Ruby.

Mike Burns took a look at how we write controller actions and how conditionals
are handled in languages like Smalltalk or the Either type in Haskell. He thinks
we can do better in Rails. A little taste:

Josh Clayton started learning C during the trip and got his toes wet by starting
a graph database called Loxosceles. Also of interest:
NoSQL Summer Boston is discussing graph
transversals tonight, if you’re up for a swim.

Jon Yurek has a lot of requests for other storage engines with Paperclip, other
than the filesystem and using S3. A new gem isn’t released yet, but the
necessary refactoring was done to allow this to happen. Review the patch
here!

Matt Mongeau and I worked on pushing out some changes on
Gemcutter/RubyGems.org. We finally got around to
deploying changes to move over to the fantastic
Fog library for talking to S3, and also a new
endpoint to hopefully speed Bundler up with some Redis magic. A small sample of
what we whipped up is here.

Mike Burns and Harold Giménez took a crack at a Ruby ORM for PostgreSQL that
fully embraces PostgreSQL’s features making it Postgres-specific. They spent a
few hours working on the DDL, INSERT, and SELECT aspects (which later influenced
Who, mentioned above) before working on the Postgres fun: check constraints for
validation, not null, unique, and foreign key constraints. They spent some time
adding support for most postgres data
types, and took a
crack at supporting table inheritance.